Okay,
see I'm trying to figure out why half the world's population still believes
in angry sky gods who HATE PEOPLE (especially women).

This much I got: Jews tried to ruin all the
fun in the ancient world (they sure tried to ruin my fun as a kid) by
slaughtering anyone who wouldn't kiss the spacious yet invisible tuchass of
Yahweh. Then Jesus came along and tried to loosen things up -- not too much,
but enough -- but the Rabbis fingered him to the Romans (Americans in
sandals) who nailed him to a cross to show the world, ancient and modern,
that that's what everybody who tried to live his own life was in for: pain,
pain and more pain (forgive them, Pops, they knew not what they did? Damn
straight they did!).

But just because the West has been so
barbarically cruel and despotic to the Islamic world for the past two
centuries (and during the Great Crusades) it doesn't make Islam any better
or worse than the previous two nightmares.

I'd say they're on equal footing.

Truly, I can't tell
the damn difference between Judaism and Islam and I'm Jewish, or so they
tell me, that is, my parents were Jewish so that makes me Jewish? But what
if my parents were hockey fans, would that make me too a hockey fan? No,
the Germans came up with that one, the ethnicity of Judaism. In essence
they're saying Moses didn't make you Jewish, Hitler did, and both the
Zionists and the Nazis agree on this as they do on so many things such as
"racial" purity by virtue of intra-marriage.

"What's the greatest
gift, I mean the GREATEST gift god gave to the Jewish people?" A rabbi once
asked me with a smug smile. "The Catskills?" I replied. "NO! Idiot. The
gift of marriage. That Jews may marry other Jews and the race may prosper."
"But I didn't marry a Jew. I'm not even a Jew myself if believing in Yahweh
and all his nasty works -- beating on those poor desert folks to get his
kicks -- means being Jewish. Why didn't he pick on someone his own size?"
"There was nobody his size. Anyway, you married a shiksa? Then you're
completing the work that Hitler started." "Whoa. Now hold on there, mein
yiddisher hombre. You mean that me, little ol' me with my diddly little
human life expectancy of three score and ten plus or minus a few for smoking
cigars -- I don't inhale -- should be compared to Hitler, a man responsible
for murdering eleven million people in concentration camps, six million of
them Jewish, and causing a world war that resulted in a body count of about
forty million, simply because I chose to spend the rest of my life, such as
it is, with the one person on this planet I truly love?" "Darn tootin',"
said the rabbi. He proceeded to go on about the sins of assimilation by
celebrity Jews such as the Woody Allen (still a "good guy" at the
time; playing Mr. Bumble to Mia Farrow's Mother Teresa) etc. That's where I
caught him. "But," I said, "What was Woody Allen's greatest gift to the
Jews?" The Chief rabbi and his fellow lesser rabbis scratched their
beards, then shrugged their shoulders. "He didn't marry a Shiksa! He only
lives with one."

The women in the
kitchen, doing the dishes, laughed at this, and that was the end of my
welcome because women, among all these fundamentalist types, Jewish,
Christian, Muslim or Hare Krishna, are not permitted to laugh, especially
not at the joke of a wise-ass stranger.

I could spend a lifetime going on about the Jews, but that would offend the
Christians, who are equally ridiculous. It's kind of funny we have the most
illiterate "industrialized" nation on the one hand, but also the most
religious. I mean, isn't all religion just literary criticism? Bad
literary criticism, but Lit-Crit nonetheless. Don't they call both
Fundamentalist Christians and Jews "people of the book?" I mean the
Fundamentalist Christians are always going around thumping their bibles
(it's a bit of a schlep to carry around a Torah, much less pound one, so
Jews don't get much thumping done) and talking about "Chronicles verse 4
word six letter 3" or some shit like that? Who knows? Maybe they just
memorize that stuff from church on Sundays. Maybe they don't actually read
their bibles -- all that sex and violence might freak them out of their
polyester garb -- just thump them. Now the Old Testament was relentlessly
long and boring, and the New Testament was just boring, but mercifully short
(probably the reason there're so many more Christians than Jews) so I just
haven't yet been able to bring myself to read the Koran. I can't say much
about Islam other than it looks to me a whole lot like Orthodox Judaism,
what with the praying several times a day to a single super pissed off god
who hates women even though, technically, by creating men, women created Him
and the women's gods were around for about 200,000 years of human evolution
and Allah and his buddies Christ and Yahweh have only been around for a few
millennia and LOOK AT THE DAMAGE THEY'VE DONE.

Not only has the
Christian world gone through Crusades, Inquisitions and two world wars
during the course of one of which they murdered nearly all of Europe's Jews,
but then the Jews themselves went out and kicked the Palestinians off their
land (allegedly promised to them by Yahweh, but only after they got rid of
the Canaanites. Find me a Canaanite and I'll show you the Mother Of All
Lawsuits), but the Muslims weren't much better, spreading their religion,
like the Christians, by the sword (the Jews didn't spread their religion
because people have enough problems with their own religions, the last thing
they need is kosher wine and heavy black cassocks in the summer; but also
it's supposed to be like a special club, the "Chosen People," sort of like
the Skull and Bones among the Big three Abrahamic hustles).

So now we have the Israelis or Zionists -- not a religion really, then
again, neither am I, yet we both fall under the category of "Jews"--
torturing and murdering the Palestinians for the OTHER half of the land they
took but didn't officially get until they did what any other Nation among
Nations would do: stole it by force.

The Moslems are pissed
off at this, but more pissed off at the West in general for exploiting them
for their oil, but unfortunately for them (and fortunately for us?) their
leaders are either super fundamentalists whackos, corrupt Military
Dictators, Billionaire Monarchs, or merely Whichever-Way-The-Sirocco-Blows
politicians who just don't have the firepower to take on the West, so they
have to wheel and deal with Washington and hope their people don't rise up
and storm the palace, like in Iran.

And finally we have
the West itself, or more specifically the "last Super Power" which is -- and
let's cut that Judeo-Christian crap -- a Christian nation run by
Fundamentalist Christians who want all the Jews to gather in Palestine so
Christ can come and either convert or kill them (but what's he gonna convert
them to, Reform Judaism?) and the whacko Zionist court Jews, lobbyists and
AIPACers who'll gladly go along with their Armageddon trip so long as they
"restructure" the Mid-East (you know, minor alterations, like erasing
Afghanistan and Iraq) to make the world "safe" for Israel which seems pretty
safe considering its obviously well-equipped army and "secret" stash of
Nukes. But then, those Palestinian kids sure have good aim with rocks and
plenty of suicide bombers to blow themselves up in pizza parlors as gifts to
the IDF who can then ask for even more weapons from the United States and
receive them (kinda like the 9/11 tragedy was such a boon to Bush Inc.
because all clods have silver lined spoons in there mouths or some old
cliché).

But what has this to
do with life and death in the cosmos? Not much. Religion is just literary
criticism, like I said, and anyone who's suffered through a PH.D. in English
knows there ain't no spirituality in that. In fact, no matter who wins, it
seems women are the losers cause all these religions are merely patriarchal
reactions to tens if not hundreds of thousands of years of peace and harmony
and human evolution under matriarchal societies who worshipped Goddesses and
ate of the Tree and thought sex was celebratory, not sinful, without being
TOO literal: they knew what they were really worshipping was Life and
Earth's power to generate more life, but that don't mean bupkis if you're a
Jew or Christian or Muslim waiting for your pie in the sky from your version
of an ancient Sumerian sky god (and a pie in the face for the "infidels").

So
relax, enjoy. Like all schools of criticism, these dusty old turkeys are
gonna end soon. Not with a whimper, but a BIG BANG. Hey! Isn't that how it
all began? That is, according to Science, the newest "religion".

Adam Engel writes and lives in NYC. He has
published essays, poems, and fiction in numerous magazines, online and off,
and has just completed his first full-length book, Topiary, which he
hopes to publish by the spring. He can be reached at
bartleby.samsa@verizon.net